Sometimes it can be. For example, refute the claim that the earth is flat and there is a general conspiracy to lie about the earth’s shape so you can only use information which you personally gather.
That’s not terribly hard—e.g. you can see the Earth’s curvature from a normal commercial airliner—but misses the real point. If there’s a general conspiracy of such magnitude and pervasiveness, whether Earth is actually flat is likely to be the least of my concerns.
Science is based on the principal of nullius in verba (take no one’s word for it). So your attitude is anti-scientific and likely to fall a foul of Goodhart’s law.
You misunderstand. The real point is that in the case we’re talking about I suddenly discover that my picture of how the world is constructed is all wrong. Not only the world of physics, but the world of politics, culture, etc. as well. It turns out I don’t really understand how it all works which should be very worrisome. And while mundane physics looks more or less the same (after all, I know how to go about my daily life without falling into the sky or somesuch), finding out that societies function in some entirely different manner than I expected is a good cause for alarm.
the scientific approach is think about how to refute the claim that the earth is flat using only information you personally gather
I disagree.
Science is not about having to poke everything with your own finger. In particular, science is perfectly fine with having to deal with uncertain evidence. I think your approach went out of favour somewhere around XVII century.
Last time I was on an airliner I looked for but could not see any evidence of the Earth’s curvature. Don’t religions show you can get huge numbers of people to believe things are that not true? And I bet some great religions were started as high level conspiracies to get populations to have beliefs useful for their leaders.
At risk of derailing the thread here, I’d say there are no examples you can bring of a politically created/patronized religion displacing native beliefs, assuming the mentality of the public didn’t favor that religion. For instance, Anglicanism may have suited the British state well, but it wasn’t arbitrarily forced onto a resistant Catholic population.
“Convert or die” was a very popular proposition for many centuries.
Take, I don’t know, former Yugoslavia. The Bosnians are mostly Muslim, the Serbs are Christian Orthodox, and the Croats are Roman Catholic. You think that’s because they all had different mentalities?
Ugh… I’m talking about whoever created Islam or Christianity in the first place, and Lumifer’s response didn’t seem to acknowledge that. I am indeed aware that Islam predates the Ottoman dynasty.
“During the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, forcibly Roman Catholicized the Saxons from their native Germanic paganism by way of warfare, and law upon conquest. Examples are the Massacre of Verden in 782, when Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred upon rebelling against conversion, and the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a law imposed on conquered Saxons in 785 that prescribed death to those who refused to convert to Christianity.”
Ah, I mean a religion that was created or originally propagated through patronization. Every religion has been patronized for political purposes at some point. Christianity is a pretty good example of a religion that was not useful to the authorities during its early years.
You’re not giving the full quote, and even if he had said that, it wouldn’t remotely meet any burden of proof for showing Christianity was probably created for political purposes. The behavior of the Roman authorities towards Christianity seems to offer more evidence against that, as well as the embarrassment for having their Messiah be crucified by a Roman governor.
Yes, but I would rather not say in part because I don’t have proof and because I don’t want to falsely signal to any of my future students that I don’t like them believe of their religion.
Ah yes, academia. The bastion of free inquiry and free thought.
However I’m somewhat familiar with the early history of Islam and the idea of a “high level conspiracy” doesn’t fit well. When Muhammad started having his revelations, he was basically a nobody and even after that for quite a while his fate was very touch-and-go.
The Qur’an wasn’t written down until a while after Muhammad’s death, by which time there was an incentive for leaders to edit it for their own benefit.
See also Emperor Constantine I’s efforts to quash dissent within the Christian community in order to make it more politically unified.
The Qur’an wasn’t written down until a while after Muhammad’s death, by which time there was an incentive for leaders to edit it for their own benefit.
True, but so what? I am sure there was editing, but I am also sure that the post-standardization Koran was very similar to the floating set of surahs at the time of Muhammad. You can’t just substitute one set of religious teaching for another this way.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. Religious doctrines get sorted out over centuries so that the most viable survive. People who deliberately set out to create their own cult can’t match this.
Sure, but (without even mentioning how much it takes from mainstream Christianity) Mormonism is… 150 years old. How many Quakers do you see these days?
What is the point that you are making? Religions get born, go through natural/social selection, some survive—for some time, some do not. This is all uncontroversial, as far as I know.
When you set up a new religion, you don’t know how successful will it be, but the probability of it becoming very successful is not zero.
I admit it’s possible for components of a religion to be taken from political propaganda (certain parts of the NT fit the bill), but inventing the idea as a whole… I can’t see how that would work out. Except maybe in the case of Islam, but even then it was just grabbing on to the coattails of Judaism and Christianity.
I’m not sure it counts. Muhammad certainly existed. Most of the theology wouldn’t have been made up as you describe. I’m really just talking about the origin story, since whether Islam actually came from Arabia isn’t certain.
The idea as I know it comes from Patricia Crone, but it’s been picked up by other historians like Tom Holland. Basically, it claims that Muhammad came from Jordan and the idea of Islam originating in Medina was an attempt to ‘Arabize’ the new religion.
Ah, interesting. But it seems that this “Revisionist” school is about critically analysing Koran and hadiths—basically not taking them at their word which is entirely reasonable. The claim that Islam didn’t originate in Arabia is mostly limited to Crone and even she looks to have abandoned this claim: Wikipedia says “Later, Patricia Crone refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam’s beginnings”.
Um… did you read the following sentence? She didn’t abandon the idea at all. And there’s at least one major work that argues for it: ‘In the Shadow of the Sword.’
I did read the following sentence and noted that it does not have any footnotes attached to it—as far as I can see it’s an unsubstantiated assertion by some Wikipedia editor.
Besides “I’m not going to admit I was wrong, I just will stop talking/writing about this” counts as abandonment in my book.
As to Tom Holland, he is a writer, not an academic. Pop science, of course, has a rather large liking for outrageous claims.
Refraining from a ‘detailed’ reconstruction seems quite reasonable. In history, you don’t generally have to explain how something happens to assert that it did.
Holland is indeed something of a pop author, but once you’ve translated Herodotus it’s hard to claim that you have no real expertise in history.
That does not apply to outside-of-the-mainstream views.
It does indeed. Evidence that x is true is not the same as an explanation of how x occurred. For instance, we can see that an ancient city was burned down around a certain year, but not know for what purpose or by whom.
History is a very big subject. Translating Herodotus does not give you any insights into VI-VII century Arabia.
With straightforward archeological evidence, yes, it does. But if you are talking about a different interpretation of well-known sources, it’s not like you have new facts—what you are offering is a new narrative and that needs, basically, to make sense. “Making sense” here implies fitting into a larger context better than the old narrative which, in turn, involves better explanations of how and why things known to happen happened.
You just complained that he wasn’t an academic.
The point of that was to draw your attention to the criteria for his work. An academic (outside of gender studies and such) generally has to be very careful about his claims and very explicit about the evidence he uses. There are a lot of safeguards against jumping to conclusions and shoddy scholarship tends to be ruinous to a reputation.
A popsci writer, on the other hand, has incentives to produce an exciting and controversial story which will sell well.
Sometimes it can be. For example, refute the claim that the earth is flat and there is a general conspiracy to lie about the earth’s shape so you can only use information which you personally gather.
That’s not terribly hard—e.g. you can see the Earth’s curvature from a normal commercial airliner—but misses the real point. If there’s a general conspiracy of such magnitude and pervasiveness, whether Earth is actually flat is likely to be the least of my concerns.
Science is based on the principal of nullius in verba (take no one’s word for it). So your attitude is anti-scientific and likely to fall a foul of Goodhart’s law.
Which particular part of my attitude is anti-scientific?
That what you describe as the “real point” amounts to an appeal to authority.
You misunderstand. The real point is that in the case we’re talking about I suddenly discover that my picture of how the world is constructed is all wrong. Not only the world of physics, but the world of politics, culture, etc. as well. It turns out I don’t really understand how it all works which should be very worrisome. And while mundane physics looks more or less the same (after all, I know how to go about my daily life without falling into the sky or somesuch), finding out that societies function in some entirely different manner than I expected is a good cause for alarm.
Ok, now your just (intentionally?) missing the point of the hypothetical.
Also, science can and has been (and certainly still is) wrong about a lot of stuff. (Nutrition being a recent less-controversial example.)
Science is a methodology, not a set of conclusions.
At any given moment in time scientists are definitely wrong about a lot of stuff.
Agreed. Which is why the scientific approach is think about how to refute the claim that the earth is flat using only information you personally gather, rather than making snarky comments about the implausibility of the conspiracy.
I disagree.
Science is not about having to poke everything with your own finger. In particular, science is perfectly fine with having to deal with uncertain evidence. I think your approach went out of favour somewhere around XVII century.
Last time I was on an airliner I looked for but could not see any evidence of the Earth’s curvature. Don’t religions show you can get huge numbers of people to believe things are that not true? And I bet some great religions were started as high level conspiracies to get populations to have beliefs useful for their leaders.
At risk of derailing the thread here, I’d say there are no examples you can bring of a politically created/patronized religion displacing native beliefs, assuming the mentality of the public didn’t favor that religion. For instance, Anglicanism may have suited the British state well, but it wasn’t arbitrarily forced onto a resistant Catholic population.
“Convert or die” was a very popular proposition for many centuries.
Take, I don’t know, former Yugoslavia. The Bosnians are mostly Muslim, the Serbs are Christian Orthodox, and the Croats are Roman Catholic. You think that’s because they all had different mentalities?
Did the Ottoman Sultans invent Islam?
Given that you know the expression “Ottoman sultans”, what do you think?
No. The Ottoman Empire started in 1299. Islam, and various very powerful caliphates, had existed for centuries before that.
Ugh… I’m talking about whoever created Islam or Christianity in the first place, and Lumifer’s response didn’t seem to acknowledge that. I am indeed aware that Islam predates the Ottoman dynasty.
From Wikipedia:
“During the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, forcibly Roman Catholicized the Saxons from their native Germanic paganism by way of warfare, and law upon conquest. Examples are the Massacre of Verden in 782, when Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred upon rebelling against conversion, and the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a law imposed on conquered Saxons in 785 that prescribed death to those who refused to convert to Christianity.”
Ah, I mean a religion that was created or originally propagated through patronization. Every religion has been patronized for political purposes at some point. Christianity is a pretty good example of a religion that was not useful to the authorities during its early years.
Matthew 22:21 Jesus said “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.
You’re not giving the full quote, and even if he had said that, it wouldn’t remotely meet any burden of proof for showing Christianity was probably created for political purposes. The behavior of the Roman authorities towards Christianity seems to offer more evidence against that, as well as the embarrassment for having their Messiah be crucified by a Roman governor.
It helps if you’re over an ocean and there are no clouds.
Anything in particular you have in mind?
Yes, but I would rather not say in part because I don’t have proof and because I don’t want to falsely signal to any of my future students that I don’t like them believe of their religion.
Ah yes, academia. The bastion of free inquiry and free thought.
However I’m somewhat familiar with the early history of Islam and the idea of a “high level conspiracy” doesn’t fit well. When Muhammad started having his revelations, he was basically a nobody and even after that for quite a while his fate was very touch-and-go.
The Qur’an wasn’t written down until a while after Muhammad’s death, by which time there was an incentive for leaders to edit it for their own benefit.
See also Emperor Constantine I’s efforts to quash dissent within the Christian community in order to make it more politically unified.
True, but so what? I am sure there was editing, but I am also sure that the post-standardization Koran was very similar to the floating set of surahs at the time of Muhammad. You can’t just substitute one set of religious teaching for another this way.
Yes, that’s precisely my point. Religious doctrines get sorted out over centuries so that the most viable survive. People who deliberately set out to create their own cult can’t match this.
They can get lucky. Example: Joseph Smith.
Sure, but (without even mentioning how much it takes from mainstream Christianity) Mormonism is… 150 years old. How many Quakers do you see these days?
What is the point that you are making? Religions get born, go through natural/social selection, some survive—for some time, some do not. This is all uncontroversial, as far as I know.
When you set up a new religion, you don’t know how successful will it be, but the probability of it becoming very successful is not zero.
It’s a safe assumption that any religion with ancient roots was not made up by someone for political purposes.
I don’t see why. Religions mutate and evolve.
I admit it’s possible for components of a religion to be taken from political propaganda (certain parts of the NT fit the bill), but inventing the idea as a whole… I can’t see how that would work out. Except maybe in the case of Islam, but even then it was just grabbing on to the coattails of Judaism and Christianity.
So you can see. And the example is the second most popular religion in the world.
I’m not sure it counts. Muhammad certainly existed. Most of the theology wouldn’t have been made up as you describe. I’m really just talking about the origin story, since whether Islam actually came from Arabia isn’t certain.
I haven’t read anything which doubts that. What is the alternative theory?
The idea as I know it comes from Patricia Crone, but it’s been picked up by other historians like Tom Holland. Basically, it claims that Muhammad came from Jordan and the idea of Islam originating in Medina was an attempt to ‘Arabize’ the new religion.
Ah, interesting. But it seems that this “Revisionist” school is about critically analysing Koran and hadiths—basically not taking them at their word which is entirely reasonable. The claim that Islam didn’t originate in Arabia is mostly limited to Crone and even she looks to have abandoned this claim: Wikipedia says “Later, Patricia Crone refrained from this attempt of a detailed reconstruction of Islam’s beginnings”.
Um… did you read the following sentence? She didn’t abandon the idea at all. And there’s at least one major work that argues for it: ‘In the Shadow of the Sword.’
I did read the following sentence and noted that it does not have any footnotes attached to it—as far as I can see it’s an unsubstantiated assertion by some Wikipedia editor.
Besides “I’m not going to admit I was wrong, I just will stop talking/writing about this” counts as abandonment in my book.
As to Tom Holland, he is a writer, not an academic. Pop science, of course, has a rather large liking for outrageous claims.
Refraining from a ‘detailed’ reconstruction seems quite reasonable. In history, you don’t generally have to explain how something happens to assert that it did.
Holland is indeed something of a pop author, but once you’ve translated Herodotus it’s hard to claim that you have no real expertise in history.
That does not apply to outside-of-the-mainstream views.
History is a very big subject. Translating Herodotus does not give you any insights into VI-VII century Arabia.
It does indeed. Evidence that x is true is not the same as an explanation of how x occurred. For instance, we can see that an ancient city was burned down around a certain year, but not know for what purpose or by whom.
You just complained that he wasn’t an academic.
With straightforward archeological evidence, yes, it does. But if you are talking about a different interpretation of well-known sources, it’s not like you have new facts—what you are offering is a new narrative and that needs, basically, to make sense. “Making sense” here implies fitting into a larger context better than the old narrative which, in turn, involves better explanations of how and why things known to happen happened.
The point of that was to draw your attention to the criteria for his work. An academic (outside of gender studies and such) generally has to be very careful about his claims and very explicit about the evidence he uses. There are a lot of safeguards against jumping to conclusions and shoddy scholarship tends to be ruinous to a reputation.
A popsci writer, on the other hand, has incentives to produce an exciting and controversial story which will sell well.